Lenny Palmer

A butcher, bar bouncer, bartender, roofer, factory worker, taxi driver, laborer, longshoreman, novelist, poet, short story writer, movie and restaurant reviewer, publisher, newspaper columnist, television personality, champion weightlifter, wrestler, father of four, and talk show host to name a few of his many lives.

Recent Blogs

Synopsis:April, 1975.
Life just doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with cabbie-artist Johnny Jump. Having helped rid his rust belt city of a dangerous, corrupt alderman and his murderous paramour he now finds himself under threat of violent termination from the underworld associates of the recently expired elected official. He is told in no uncertain terms by the local police that he must disappear. His very presence is hampering their investigation into the labyrinthine criminal dealings of local government, so Johnny is ordered to leave town, and pronto.
Johnny’s good friend and recently-promoted Captain Leonard Featherstone of the PD suggests Johnny cool his heels in Featherstone’s home town of Jerusalem, a centuries old port town on the upper Mississippi River. Featherstone remembers Jerusalem fondly as an idyllic boyhood fantasy, and he offers to buy Johnny a one-way bus ticket and set him up with Featherstone’s Tenth Mountain Division buddy, former biker and combat veteran turned...

July 31, 1974
I damned near ran over the corpse.
I’ve seen plenty of dead men, and plenty of violent death in Viet Nam, and you could say I’d become immune to the shock, but this dead man gave me a jolt. I thought at first it was a raccoon, one of those big sons of bitches that live in the city’s sewers and whose bulging eyes are frequently trapped in my cab’s headlights as they creep out of the concrete caverns they call home. Or maybe a porcine urban rat, one that scurried off a thick docking rope tied to one of the ocean-going ships anchored in the harbor; the kind that morph to the size of puppies. Or an alley cat; the thirty-plus pounders that every animal in the city gave a wide birth, or risk a world-class ass-whipping. But it wasn’t any expired metropolitan wildlife bathed in my cab’s beams. It was a dead man sprawled out in the middle of the road, legs bifurcated, arms spread crucifix-style, face pressed against the pavement like some half-assed Jesus ashamed to look...